


as syllable from sound

by possibilityleft



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: 5 Times, Backstory, Canon Compliant, Gen, Platonic Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-19
Updated: 2017-03-19
Packaged: 2018-10-07 21:17:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10369611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/possibilityleft/pseuds/possibilityleft
Summary: 6 memories the Director wanted to give to the voidfish, and one she wanted to keep.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I know that the voidfish doesn't take away memories from people who have drunk its ichor, but these are a selection of memories Lucretia would happily forget. Except the last one.
> 
> There are spoilers for the Suffering Game arc throughout, and rampant speculation on how the Bureau of Balance came to be and the part of other characters in that forming. The sections are not in chronological order. This is only canon-compliant to Episode 58.
> 
> Title is from Emily Dickinson's [The Brain -- is wider than the Sky](http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/emily_dickinson/poems/5377).

**1.**

"Man, you have got to stop moving," Robbie said, and Lucretia started, which likely didn't help matters. She'd been lost in thought, or maybe dozing off -- one seemed to drift into another more and more frequently these days.

"It is going to be real hard to make you look all dignified if you're asleep," he complained, and she sighed and shifted in her seat, straightening up and crossing her hands at her knees. Robbie ducked down in his bag and pulled out another brush. He began painting again, this time in blessed silence, and Lucretia listened to the soft rasp of the brushstrokes on the canvas.

"I could, uh, I could even you out a bit," Robbie said as he worked, glancing over the canvas at her for just a moment as if to judge her reaction to the suggestion. Lucretia's hand crept up over her chest and stopped in the indentation that had been her left breast, once upon a time. Her shoulder still ached on cold nights, but she had survived. Her friends had not been so lucky. The Bureau had almost ended that day, but here they were. They were floating in the sky in a moonbase so new that some parts still smelled like paint. Robbie had done quite a bit of the painting, and somehow he'd managed to stick around afterwards. Really, she'd intended to have the voidfish wipe him and then return him to the surface, because she wasn't sure what else he'd be good at beyond coloring within the lines, but she'd gotten distracted by everything else she needed to get done.

And then he'd offered to paint her. The Director should have her own portrait, he'd said, even though he'd yawned afterwards, which kind of undercut the statement. For some reason she'd agreed, and now that she'd sat for four sessions, she felt committed to the completion.

"No," she said, and if her voice wobbled a bit, Robbie didn't appear to notice. He was eating chips loudly with his non-dominant hand and dabbing at the portrait with the other. He shrugged.

"No skin off my nose," he said cheerfully, around a mouthful of salty chips.

"Give me one of those," Lucretia said, and obligingly he reached into his bag.

*

Every day, Lucretia wondered when she should stop stalling and do what needed to be done with Robbie. The thing was, and this was probably pretty vain of her to consider, but he'd never told anyone about that conversation, or complained when she'd hung the portrait in her own office, out of sight for most, or said a single thing whenever she had it enchanted after Wonderland. She couldn't look at her old face any longer, and she couldn't look at Robbie's.

So there he stayed, in the brig that had once been a storage room, and here she stayed, in the Bureau, sending out Reclaimers to do the jobs she couldn't.

*

**2.**

Boyland had a lover in every port, apparently; the Regulators liked to joke about it, and he seemed amused by their treatment so Lucretia didn't step in. She could see where the idea came from, at least -- he was extremely charming and considerate, even if he weren't the most handsome dwarf she'd met. He gave her a card for her birthday, along with a gift card to Fantasy Barnes and Noble, and she didn't even remember ever telling him when her birthday was.

"If I didn't know better, I'd say you were being a suck-up," she said, and when he laughed, she saw his dimples peeking out from under his craggly beard. She found herself coughing, all the sudden, and had to excuse herself to go back to her office.

She knew he didn't mean anything about it -- he truly was this friendly with everyone -- and the fact that it affected her so deeply felt wrong. She wasn't supposed to be distracted from the mission, and it was just a momentary crush. She of all people had to keep her focus. She tucked the card into her desk drawer and went back to reviewing the week's reports, turning over each page carefully as she read through them, making notes in her notebook as she went. Carey had already weeded out most of the noise for her. None of the informants that she kept planetside all the time knew exactly what they were looking for -- it was safer that way for everyone. If any of them got too close to figuring it out, they were Regulated or became Seekers. That was how Boyland had initially joined them, in fact -- even before the Bureau, he had been quite the traveler, and a great source of information.

She didn't end up spending the gift card before they lost Boyland; she didn't go down to the planet much anymore. When she found it while sorting through papers much later, she glanced around to make sure she was alone, which she was, of course, before lifting it to her face and inhaling. The cigar smell had long since faded away.

*

**3.**

The Bureau of Balance was barely more than a glimmer of hope in Lucretia's mind at this point, but placing an ad with Craig made it feel so official. Of course, there was a decent chance that no one would even read the page, but it was a step forward towards the future she hoped they'd all live to have. She waited in the cramped, narrow office that she kept above a sweets shop in Neverwinter. This was headquarters for now, until Lucas could finish development on the moonbase, which wouldn't happen for quite a while (they had to wait for the venture capital to come in).

So she felt quite gratified when there was a knock at the door and she opened it to find a drow standing there, holding a scrap of paper. He grinned pleasantly at her, showing quite a bit of fang, and she ushered him in, and then had to awkwardly navigate around him to get behind her desk.

"What a quaint little outpost," he said, and introduced himself as Brian. "And this is also Brian!" he added, gesturing to the little spider that rode on his shoulder like some kind of terrifying parrot. The spider waved its two front legs at her, and Lucretia suppressed a shudder.

"That must be confusing," she said, wondering why anyone would name their pet after themselves, but trying to be game. He was possibly going to be her very first employee, after all. It wasn't like she had a lot of options at this point; the caliber of applicants, she expected, would be somewhat proportional to the amount that she could pay, and there really wasn't any equity in world-saving at this point. It would be different later, after the Bureau had recovered enough non-Relic artifacts to sell and really earn some money, but right now, she had to work with what she got.

"Well, it just felt right," Brian drawled. "You can call me Magic Brian, if it will make things easier!"

He had a lot of experience with thralls and an acceptable level of power, along with a sense of adventure and a fiance whom he apparently loved very much. There was something about the way that he was so determined to put her at ease that she found suspicious, but she was a little worried that she was just discounting him because he was a dark elf with a weird accent and a creepy pet, and that felt racist.

"I do love seeking powerful things," he said, and finally Lucretia found herself shaking his hand and handing him a bracer. They weren't magically mounted back then, before Leon had come to the Bureau, and Brian slid it onto his arm without much ceremony, tutting a little to himself.

"Quite plain, don't you think?" he said. "We need a logo!"

"Uh, sure," she agreed, mostly because she wanted him to leave, but the next week he submitted several prototypes via an intricately calligraphed letter, and she picked one -- the simplest design, which looked like a pair of touching hourglasses. She had it carved into the next bracer she handed out, and just like that, the Bureau was coming to life around her.

*

**4.**

"Paging the Director," Lucretia's necklace said gruffly, and she set down her tray and stepped out of the lunch line without hesitation. She headed down the hallway at a swift clip, looking for the closest empty room, and she ended up stepping into a supply closet.

"This is she," she answered. There was a crackling noise, and a little feedback, which made her wince, but then Bain's voice came back on the line.

"Director, we've got a problem down here," he said. "I think someone's found a Relic, and it's going bad fast. Probably the Sash, just judging by the general phenomena. Lotsa vines."

He wasn't panicked, which Lucretia appreciated. Bain always kept his head in a crisis. The first time they'd met, it was because he'd run towards the source of a scream, not away. The man was never off the clock. Lucretia had been in Goldcliff visiting the bank that held some of the Bureau's more valuable investments, and she'd been just outside when she heard someone scream from an alley around the corner. She'd clutched her staff tightly and wondered if she should go take a look, but found it off-putting that most of the people striding up the steps around her didn't even break stride. But one man had -- an enormous lug of a man who had been standing by the door when she'd gone in, who had nodded politely and called her, "Ma'am." He pushed his way down the stairs like a man possessed, and by the time she made it to the scene, he was holding a cutpurse by the ear. Lucretia had heard a lot of good things about the Goldcliff militia, which was part of the reason she'd agreed to keep their funds there. For the first time, she'd wondered if it might be useful to have someone working with the Bureau who was also a member of a more traditional law enforcement organization.

Sergeant Captain Bain hadn't taken a lot of convincing, and once he'd been promoted to the title his aspirational name had suggested, they had dozens more eyes on the ground. His use was somewhat limited, due to the fact that he could only go where the militia was posted, but Bain took the commitment very seriously. He spent hours in the Goldcliff Library when he was off militia duty, and if Lucretia shut her eyes in the cramped supply closet where she was standing, next to rows and rows of toilet paper, she could see Bain in her mind, tiny pair of glasses pushed up on his nose, puzzling his way through the newest reports.

"Get your people out," she told him through the necklace, although she was sure he already had. Bain was fiercely loyal to the folks under his command, Bureau or otherwise. "I'm sending my best Reclaimers." She hesitated. "Truly, I mean that. They are a little… unconventional, but you can trust them with your life."

"Yes, ma'am," Bain said. "Message received." There was another piercing squeal from the pendant, and Lucretia held it out away from her as if she could escape the sound. The noise resolved into a deep earth-shaking sound, and then Bain was barking orders at his men, the stone of farspeech clearly forgotten.

"I said we're moving out! Hup to, Private, hup to! Don't touch the damn vines, I already said!"

The sound clicked off abruptly and Lucretia emerged from the closet, prompting a surprised look from Johann, who was passing by with his harp under one arm and a collection of scrolls under the other. He dropped several, but she didn't wait to help him pick them up. She was trying to remember where her Reclaimers would be this time of day, her mind already steps ahead. Bain needed the boys as soon as they could get there, and she was going to make that happen.

When the Reclaimers returned without Bain at their back, she knew what that meant -- she hadn't been fast enough.

*

**5.**

"You realize how insane this is, right?" Lucas asked, for at least the fifth time, and Lucretia repeated herself, because she didn't know what else to say at this point.

"Yes," she answered honestly. "But what choice do we have? Lucas, you know what happens when people know about the Relics. This is our chance to get out in front of this. Maybe our only chance."

She stared down at her hands, which were resting on her desk. Lucas was standing in front of her, his fists clenched and brow furrowed, looking impossibly young. It was funny how quickly she'd adjusted her mindset to the age she'd become now. She felt 48, not 28 and tired. Lucas had been older than her before. Wonderland had destroyed every desire she'd ever had to be reckless. Was she concerned about where the voidfish had come from, what else it could do? Of course she was. (She wished she could remember how they'd found it and brought it here, but couldn't capture the concern as more than a fleeting thought.) Lucas didn't mean to be condescending, she knew, but she still found it irritating.

"Leave it alone," she said to him. "Don't bother it or Johann. He doesn't know any more about it than I do. We try to keep it happy, and it works. It works really, really well. The Relic Society disbanded, because they couldn't remember the reason for their organization. The Goldcliff druids aren't looking for the Gaia Sash anymore. That group of Dragonborn decided to open a pub. A pub! I was sure we'd have to fight them for the Chalice when we found it. They are inventing cocktails."

"Good for them," Lucas said sourly, and he leaned over her desk, arms crossed, to make his point. "And what exactly are you going to do when that thing dies and everyone remembers? Or when it gets mad and decides to erase _you_? Am I going to come up here one day and find a Bureau full of babbling idiots? Why don't you think this through, Lucretia?"

Lucretia was on her feet before she realized it, staff in hand, and she slammed it hard against the floor as she made her point. "Oh, yeah, you're the one to lecture me about thinking something through. Great joke, Lucas. You've made your point, and you had your chance to have a leadership role in this organization. I've heard enough. I'd like you to leave."

"Fine," he snapped, turning toward the door, but he hesitated, his hand on the knob. "I'm just trying to keep you safe," he said quietly. "I don't -- we don't have a lot of friends left, do we?"

"That is correct," Lucretia said. "But I don't think that either of us is going to change the path we're on right now, are we?"

"I'll start working on an alternative solution," Lucas said, and without saying goodbye or even looking back to meet her eyes, he opened the door and left, shutting it behind him.

It was the last time they spoke in person, before the Philosopher's Stone ruined everything, and when she thought about it later, she really wished she'd tried again to offer him the bracer, even though it probably would have made no difference in the end.

*

**6.**

"Don't tell me you want to go?" Edward said, his tone just a little too plummy to seem actually concerned.

"You're so close to your prize!" Lydia encouraged. "Only a few more rooms!"

Lucretia paused. She was so, so tired, wobbly from exhaustion and injury and sudden age. She kept wiping blood out of her eyes, since it was streaming in a steady, small trickle from the gash on her forehead, and each time she saw her hand, it shocked her still. The first five-year sacrifice had felt like nothing -- an opportunity to skip a thirtieth birthday party, giving into the laugh line at the corner of her mouth. The fifteen year sacrifice was harder. She had no more years to give, not if she wanted time to retrieve all of the Relics. She wasn't a vain woman, but she was mortal. She'd given up memories of her first lover and two favorite spells already. She suspected that there was no end to Wonderland. They had no proof that the elves even had the Bell. Why continue this charade?

"Do you really think they're going to let us leave?" Cam said. "I have my doubts."

"Oh, there will be a catch," Lucretia answered him. "But so far they've played by their own rules. I'm not sure they can do otherwise."

She wasn't sure what was going through his head. She knew it was a lot to take in, joining the Bureau and then being recruited for Reclaiming. He hadn't protested the sacrifices he'd had to make so far, but he didn't have much left in him either, she knew. His left arm was gone at the shoulder, and his eye puffy from when the White Queen had struck him. His remaining hand clutched at the ribs the White Knight had kicked. He'd even given up his wand, leaving them to rely on sharing Lucretia's or verbal spells. Could she ask him to give up all that and more, and then quit before they were done?

"The bonus round is waiting!" Lydia said. "Don't you want to know what's in store for you next?"

Lucretia looked at the doors again. Healing, Recovery, Escape. She could hear ringing in her ears, but it wasn't the Bell.

"Come on, Cam," she said. "Let's go home."

The look of disbelief in his eyes stuck with her when she stumbled out into the forest alone. She wanted to say that she hadn't understood the exercise, why Cam hadn't been with her when the door shut and the buttons had been -- Trust and Foresake, just like they had been there so many times before. The truth was, she hadn't hesitated. She hadn't wanted to think about it. She slammed the Foresake button and the door opened up into sunlight, so she'd walked through it. When she turned around, there was no door. The wall was smooth and white and empty, and she wasn't surprised.

*

**1.**

Magnus kept trying to include her in things. At first, she thought he was just brown-nosing, and then she thought maybe he was just nosy. But neither seemed to be the case.

She held herself apart from the rest of the staff for the most part. She knew that it wasn't fun to have your boss hanging around all the time, especially in a job like theirs where they worked, lived, and played in the same place most of the time. The kids needed an opportunity to blow off steam, and they might not feel like they could if she was in the breakroom. She took her lunches in her office most of the time, and although she popped into the dojo and classes on occasion, she tried not to stay long. She had more than enough to do, anyway, and Davenport was company enough most days.

Magnus wanted to be her friend. Not just her employee, but her buddy. He caught her wince once after she stretched and invited her to his yoga class, which he held in the quad on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at dawn. Lucretia had passed him out there some mornings, generally on her way to bed after a long night, and had wondered what exactly he was doing -- the class was not well-attended and generally consisted only of Magnus and sometimes Carey. Lucretia did not attend.

He waved at her in the hallway and invited her to sit at his table in the cafeteria if he happened to see her there, even when there weren't enough chairs. He carved a wooden duck for her as a paperweight and seemed genuinely disappointed when he was in her office next and it wasn't holding down papers.

His latest attempt was popping into her office unannounced with baked goods. He'd observed her interactions with Taako's macaroons over Candlenights with interest, clearly. At least he wasn't the one doing the cooking. She wasn't sure who had baked the muffins, but she doubted it was Taako, whom she'd passed catnapping in the center of the quad as if he owned the place, or Magnus, since his skills with detail work seemed limited to carpentry.

"Fantasy Costco," he admitted when she asked, barking an almost embarrassed laugh. "I'm not great at cooking and Taako said he had better stuff to do. I figured that whatever Garfield was selling had to be edible. That's probably a law, right? I made sure it didn't have any kind of special powers or anything, don't worry."

She hadn't been worried until he clarified. She swallowed reluctantly, but nothing unexpected happened.

"How can I help you today, Magnus?" she asked him, setting down the rest of the muffin. His mouth was full with another, but he managed a shrug while he was chewing.

"Just wanted to share," he answered. "Make sure you're doing okay, all that stuff. Friend stuff."

"Friend stuff?"

He scratched the back of his neck, his expression so earnest that she felt a little bad about shutting him down like that.

"Well, yeah. I mean, you're always checking on everybody else, figured someone should check on you once in awhile. Totally, 100% platonically," he added hastily, in a way that suggested he'd had a more difficult version of this conversation before and wanted to head that off at the pass. She realized she was smiling. The muffin was actually really good.

"I'm fine, Magnus," she told him. "Still researching the next Relic. No mission yet, I'm afraid."

"Well, if you want a break, I talked Johann into hosting fantasy karaoke tonight and I am definitely going to get Taako drunk enough to sing. He sounds like a dying cat but thinks he's a bard, it's hilarious. Or uh, I don't know if yoga will happen tomorrow, given the karaoke, but if it does, it's an open class." He grinned.

"Thank you for the invitation," she answered politely, and his face fell.

"Man, I was hoping -- I mean, you do have hobbies, right? Stuff you like to do with other people around?"

"I crochet," she admitted after a moment. The admission made her feel oddly vulnerable. No one at the Bureau knew that about her; it wasn't like she made scarves for gifts or anything like that. Mostly she made blankets or doilies while on long farspeech calls or when she needed to wind down before bed. She rarely finished anything. For some reason, she just kept buying yarn. Crocheting was reassuring to her in some way, like there'd be no way for the world to end if she had the hook in her hands, making something out of nothing.

"Cool cool cool," he said, looking confused, so she had to pull her current small project out of her desk drawer as an explanation, and when he saw the small hook, he nodded as if in memory.

"Oh, yeah! Jules -- somebody I used to know did that. Relaxing, right?"

Magnus liked to joke about his appeal to rustic hospitality, but some small part of Lucretia wondered if it was true. She showed him how to hold the hook and walked him through the first couple steps. He almost immediately dropped a stitch and she coaxed him through fixing it.

"This is not a class," she told him finally. "I'm not accepting other participants, you know. I'm very busy."

He held up his hand and made the okay symbol, but he was smiling, and Lucretia thought that she was definitely going to receive a crooked scarf in her future. At least it would probably be warm.

*

The guards weren't missed until shift change. The security at the improvised prison was pretty lax, admittedly; Robbie wasn't really considered a flight risk on his own, although they probably should be monitoring him better given that he had no explanation for the fact that he had managed to get into the restricted areas of the base. Honestly, Lucretia believed his story that he didn't know how he'd managed it either, but that didn't mean she could let him wander around unattended, not without knowing what had possessed him (either literally or figuratively).

When the new guards came and were unable to locate the old guards, they called her, and it only took one Zone of Truth on Robbie to find out who had visited him. As to where the guards had gone, he didn't know. Lucretia ordered a full search of the base and gave serious consideration to calling back the Reclaiming mission.

The thing was, she _knew_ the boys would never make it through Wonderland without Magnus. They might not make it through regardless, but without his physical abilities and his way of cementing the group together, it would be a hopeless cause. Taako would bail and Merle would follow him and the Bell would be rung and someone else would die or worse. The two of them would die, for starters, and then she'd have no Reclaimers left.

Wherever the missing guards were, it wasn't on base, and Avi informed her that the bubble hadn't returned either. That wasn't entirely unusual, as the Reclaimers tended to be loose with other people's property, but combined with what else was going on, it made her worry.

Angus hadn't heard from them since they entered Wonderland; the stones of farspeech were unresponsive, which was to be expected. Edward and Lydia wouldn't tolerate cheating on the players' sides. There was nothing to do but wait, now. She wouldn't send anyone in after them. She stared at the papers in her inbox until her vision blurred and then she got up and walked down to see the voidfish.

"It's been a bit restless lately," Johann told her, in a carefully casual manner that suggested he was worried, but didn't want to alarm her. The voidfish doesn't look any different than usual to her, though. It floated in the tank, its tendrils waving in the water, and when she put a hand up to the glass, it ignored her touch.

She hoped she didn't have to give it Magnus's name.


End file.
